I didn’t have to look out the window to get a sense of Shelby’s frustration. Her words were clipped in response to Briggs’s good-natured, though perhaps ill-timed, teasing. It was interesting overhearing Shelby from this angle. Usually on the court, she was controlled, smart, and made fast decisions. The problem was that they were both on the court for different reasons. Briggs was more interested in teasing and physical contact disguised as a basketball game. Shelby, it would seem, was here to win a pretend championship game with a tied score and ten seconds left on the clock.
I bit back a laugh as I heard the pair stop playing to check on the effects of Shelby’s elbow to Briggs’s face.
“Shoot, is that a tooth?!” I heard Shelby gasp.
“No, I think it’s just a crown that came loose.”
“Dang it. I’m sorry! I wasn’t expecting you to be that close.”
“Yeah…sorry about that.”
For a long minute, I just lay there, silently groaning, already knowing what I had to do—and startled at the way I didn’t seem as disappointed to do it as I should have been.
My mom’s words from earlier were still picking at me. Maybe in five years I’d feel different. Maybe if we hadn’t had a kid, it would be different. I would be able to move past everything easier. But I had involved a child.Mychild. And if there was anything burning a hole in my heart, it was the fact that Sophie was going to have to live through the same pain in her childhood that I did. The same hole in her chest.
Everybody always left eventually. Even Shelby. The idea of spending time with my old friend and Sophie getting the wrong idea or getting inadvertently attached scared me.
Still, though…maybe I’d been looking at this all wrong. With everybody trying to set me up so much, I had gotten in my own head. I was still busy licking my wounds and had gone on the defensive. But maybe what I needed was a good offensive plan. One that could benefit both Shelby and me.
I had already established she was safe. She’d always been safe. It didn’t matter how she did her hair now or how long her damn legs were these days. I didn’t have to look. We had a history of being just friends. And she was leaving. That wouldn’t be a surprise later on this summer. Her plans were established right from the start.
It could work.
From the sounds of Shelby’s intense score-calling, the game was almost wrapped up. The elbow in Briggs’s face was the only action he’d be getting tonight.
I made sure Briggs had left by the time I meandered outside. Shelby was shooting free throws on the court. She still looked and felt like my childhood friend…but also different. Her hair was tucked back in a sleek ponytail. Before, there had never been anything sleek about Shelby. Even her limbs had smoothed out from gangly to…well…decidedlynotgangly.
In a slight panic, I raised my eyes and focused on her less superficial qualities. She had the effortless form of a woman who had spent her life playing the game. There was a flawlessness to her jump shot. I wished I could take some credit for that one, but she had been schooling me in basketball since the early days. She always had something to prove on the court for her dad and brother, and I had no doubt that was the root of what I had just witnessed.
She turned to grab the rebound and saw me approach.
“You up next?” she asked, her eyebrows raised as she twirled the ball on her finger in an attempt to show off. Instead, it launched toward me.
Grinning, I grabbed the ball and spun it on my own finger with the grace of a professional NBA athlete. Shelby could beat me playing the game with her hands tied behind her back, but between the two of us, I was much more of the showman. “Four years of playing college ball and you still haven’t mastered the old finger twirl?”
“Funny, I can’t think of one time where the knowledge of the finger twirl helped me win a game.”
“Did your team win any games?”
“In our hearts, we won every game.”
I took a three-point shot and smiled when it went in, much to her annoyance.
“Sounded like nobody won tonight,” I said, dipping my toe into the fray.
“What?” Her eyes shot over to my open window while I grabbed the rebound. “You were listening?”
“Hey, believe me, I would have been much better off if I hadn’t heard some of that. I’m going to have nightmares tonight.”
She yanked the ball from my hands. “He was cheating.”
“He was trying to make a move on you, not win the game.”
“No, he wasn’t.” She let out a defensive huff and shot the ball toward the basket. It lined the rim before bouncing out.
“He was flirting.” I boxed her out, her body leaning into mine as my six-foot-three frame grabbed the rebound easily.
“No, he—“ She stopped, her face clearly reliving her time on the court.